How to tell who a person is thinking about

March 6, 2013

Left LTC and dorsal mPFC areas of the brain discriminate between protagonists with high or low agreeableness (Credit: Demis Hassabis et al./Cerebral Cortex)

It is possible to tell who a person is thinking about by analyzing images of his or her brain.

Our mental models of people produce unique patterns of brain activation, which can be detected using advanced imaging techniques according to a study by Cornell University neuroscientist Nathan Spreng and his colleagues.

“When we looked at our data, we were shocked that we could successfully decode who our participants were thinking about based on their brain activity,” said Spreng, assistant professor of human development in Cornell’s College of Human Ecology.

Understanding and predicting the behavior of others is a key to successfully navigating the social world, yet little is known about how the brain actually models the enduring personality traits that may drive others’ behavior, the authors say. Such ability allows us to anticipate how someone will act in a situation that may not have happened before.

To learn more, the researchers asked 19 young adults to learn about the personalities of four people who differed on key personality traits. Participants were given different scenarios (such as sitting on a bus when an elderly person gets on and there are no seats) and asked to imagine how a specified person would respond. During the task, their brains were scanned using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), which measures brain activity by detecting changes in blood flow.

They found that different patterns of brain activity in the medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC) were associated with each of the four different personalities. In other words, which person was being imagined could be accurately identified based solely on the brain activation pattern.

The results suggest that the brain codes the personality traits of others in distinct brain regions and this information is integrated in the medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC) to produce an overall personality model used to plan social interactions, the authors say.

“Prior research has implicated the anterior mPFC in social cognition disorders such as autism and our results suggest people with such disorders may have an inability to build accurate personality models,” said Spreng. “If further research bears this out, we may ultimately be able to identify specific brain activation biomarkers not only for diagnosing such diseases, but for monitoring the effects of interventions.”

comments 4

the claims are largely exaggerated. If you were to try and read somebody’s mind with fMRI you would eventually come upon the same problem as using a lie-detector. The person can convince itself that he is speaking truth or act in such mode and cia is done. Plus, in order to actually be able use it there is a lot of stats to keep in mind, not even mentioning the potential pitfalls of reverse inference, which this would be based on…

A strange knee jerk reaction. There are no claims here, only findings. This is a fascinating (though in my opinion not very surprising) observation of what’s happening where inside the brain. Imagine the technology evolving, as it’s bound to do, and it becomes rather predictable that this will lead to the kind of results you say they’re claiming.